To the Editor:

Roger Sandall’s critique of New Zealand, “Beyond California” [June], quickly degenerates from a witty send-up in the first few paragraphs to an appallingly inaccurate portrayal of the country and its foreign policy. Mr. Sandall is both gratuitously offensive, as when he compares New Zealand to the “civilized world,” and extremely malicious when he discusses the government’s political motives and local society.

Although the nuclear-free zone declared by the Labor government has raised New Zealand’s profile in the world, it was not implemented as a power grab or as an anti-American gesture. It is simply not in New Zealand’s current interests to be party to a nuclear war. If war breaks out when nuclear vessels are in local waters, the country becomes a target. Since, given the nation’s geographic position, there is no way we can benefit from a nuclear defense, that is an unacceptable risk. The Prime Minister has repeatedly stressed that there is nothing anti-American about this, and he has not sought to dismantle the ANZUS alliance.

Indeed, I feel a good case can be made that New Zealand acts more consistently out of self-interest, not “high-mindedness” or “social self-righteousness,” than either the U.S. or Australia. Of course, assorted “trendy lefties” can be found here, but they are no more influential or representative than they might be in Iowa. So why does Mr. Sandall quote or cite them exclusively?

Take the identity issue he botches so badly. New Zealand used to be “the Britain of the South.” But then the Britain of the North joined the European Economic Community, plunging the local economy into limbo. One effect of this has been to shake up New Zealand’s colonial mentality. Given its position in the South Pacific, its search for new markets, and the fact that the Maori heritage provides its only unique cultural symbols, is it strange for New Zealand to experiment with a Pacific orientation? Some people do wax naively lyrical about it, but the strident subjectivity and manipulation of the facts evident in Mr. Sandall’s diatribe is amazing for an anthropologist from across the Tasman. The discipline is, after all, dedicated to cultural relativism.

In fact, his statements about “bohemianized academics” and “demieducated dabblers in art, anthropology, education, or social work” are even stranger for an anthropologist to make. Or is anthropology in Sydney (that well-known center of Western civilization) a purer thing?

I am almost struck dumb by Mr. Sandall’s attack on the Maori. His allegations about welfare fraud are so scurrilous that I can only note them as racist and outrageous, and hope that a Maori colleague might deign to reply to them properly. . . . The Maori people did, after all, lose roughly 80 percent of their land and population to the colonial encounter by the early decades of the 20th century.

I cannot for the life of me guess what bee has gotten into Mr. Sandall’s bonnet, unless he has a terminal case of trans-Tasman jealousy. But surely COMMENTARY has some duty to be objective. “Beyond California” goes far beyond the bounds of responsible criticism. . . .

H.B. Levine
Department of Anthropology
Victoria University
Wellington, New Zealand

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Roger Sandall writes:

So the New Zealand Left is pretty much what you might find in Iowa? Perhaps it is time H.B. Levine revisted the Midwest. I have lived in Mexico and sojourned in India. In neither place have I encounted the level of demented Yankee-phobia which now prevails among middle-class anti-nuclearists in New Zealand.

Along with this, grade-school Marxism of a numbing doctrinal simplicity is routinely featured in the middlebrow mass media. The state-owned weekly the Listener is the only cultural journal available to the mass of the population, with a stranglehold on its readership since it prints all broadcast-program information (it’s the local TV Guide). In the January 10, 1987 issue, Ranginui Walker (who seems to have had a weekly column at the time) writes that “The ideology of multiculturalism is resorted to as a mask for Pakeha [white] hegemony. . . . Capitalism alienates people from the land and the product of their labor. . . . The obscenities of capitalism are now being burned into the psyche of Maori and Pakeha alike. . . .” And on and on.

Is this what they are reading in Clear Lake, Iowa? The place must be in worse shape than I thought!

Is anti-nuclearism just practical realism, a spontaneous response to the strategic facts of life? If only that were so. Americans wishing to acquaint themselves with the deeper influences at work in New Zealand and Australia should pick up a copy of American Lake: Nuclear Peril in the Pacific, published under the auspices of the Nautilus Research Center, Massachusetts, and the Institute for Policy Studies. The book embodies the principal goal of the Australian and New Zealand “peace movements”: the irrevocable divorce of these countries from the U.S. A fuller description may be found in “Disinformation for Downunder,” by Richard D. Fisher, Jr. of the Heritage Foundation in the August 1987 issue of the Australian monthly Quadrant.

Me a racist? Fie, sir, fie! Can’t you see that for a Maori motorcycle gang to obtain $45,000 for building a $665 fence testifies to their wit, their enterprise, their panache? And that far more scandalous than the misappropriation of funds by a handful of vagabonds is the whole structure of a welfare system devised by self-deluding white socialist intellectuals—a structure which provides incentives for systematic fraud? In all of this, who are the real racists?

By the way, the last person I know of to be denounced for “scurrilous” observations about Maori life today was the famous Billy T. James. James is New Zealand’s only comedian worth the name, and has commanded 44 percent of the TV audience for his shows. He is a funny man; he is also a Maori. In their humorless way, the black-power people threw a bomb at Billy T. James; but, happily, it missed.

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